Staying Human in the Age of AI

SHOW NOTES:  

• Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World  

• Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling  

• Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers 

• Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership  

• Luke 1:26-42 

• Hebrews 4:15 

• Mark 10:45 

• John 12:6 

• Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family 

• Christianity Today – Andy Crouch  

• Praxis – Awaken Your Redemptive Imagination 

 

00;00;00;02 – 00;00;19;28

Andy Crouch

When we start trying to be efficient, we’re actually missing the key thing because formation requires friction. The whole point of efficiency is to make that clock work so predictably and reliably. It’s just that that’s not good for actually forming people.

00;00;20;00 – 00;00;39;17

Camille Hall-Ortega

On the day I got engaged years ago. I remember being so excited to share the news, but I knew I had to share it in the right way. You see, for me, at least, there would definitely be a fun post on Facebook with pictures of my then boyfriend Mike on bended knee, the Alamo standing strong as backdrop behind him.

00;00;39;19 – 00;00;59;15

Camille Hall-Ortega

But there were some people in my life, those I was closest with, who would expect to hear the news in a personal message from me. That’s because when we feel close to someone, when we feel like we’re we’re truly doing life with certain people who know us and love us. We don’t want to find out personal information about them with the masses.

00;00;59;16 – 00;01;21;08

Camille Hall-Ortega

Through technology, we expect more. But we’re living in a world that feels more and more impersonal. Relationships feel increasingly distant, and many of us have begun to feel isolated. It seems each of us may have fewer people that would share their big news in a personal way, instead of letting us find out with everyone else on social media.

00;01;21;11 – 00;01;46;26

Camille Hall-Ortega

It makes me wonder what we’re losing out on. What changes should we be making in our culture to reclaim the intimacy we all need? How is technology driving this push toward the impersonal? And how can we work to put people first? In a world dominated by devices from the H. E. Butt Foundation. I’m Camille Hall-Ortega and this is The Echoes Podcast.

00;01;46;29 – 00;02;09;19

Camille Hall-Ortega

On today’s episode, we’re welcoming author, musician and public speaker Andy Crouch. Andy is the author of five books, including Culture Making, Recovering Our Creative Calling, and most recently, The Life We’re Looking For Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. He previously served as an executive editor for Christianity Today, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine.

00;02;09;27 – 00;02;15;26

Camille Hall-Ortega

We’re excited to welcome Andy to the podcast. I’m here with my co-host, Marcus Goodyear. Hi, Marcus.

00;02;15;28 – 00;02;16;27

Marcus Goodyear

Hi, Camille.

00;02;17;00 – 00;02;18;20

Camille Hall-Ortega

Hi, Andy. Welcome.

00;02;18;23 – 00;02;21;15

Andy Crouch

Hello. Thank you so much. Great leader of you guys.

00;02;21;16 – 00;02;51;24

Camille Hall-Ortega

Yes, we’re thrilled to have you. We have. I feel lots to talk about because I’m sure you all know that your work is just really top of mind. Very timely, especially in your newest book, but all of your work. So we’re very excited. I want to just jump right in and ask you, you know, you have said that we all have a need to be known and loved through personal relationships, but we’ve seen an attempt to sort of displace that need with the ease of technology.

00;02;51;24 – 00;02;53;20

Camille Hall-Ortega

I would love to hear you talk more about that.

00;02;53;22 – 00;03;11;10

Andy Crouch

You know, I’d love to. Your intro, Camille, but gosh, I’ve got news to share. I think before a very short time ago, we would have, I thought, I will go tell my news like, this is, maybe the most interesting news in human history was when a young woman who was betrothed but not married. She hadn’t been engaged yet.

00;03;11;13 – 00;03;20;04

Andy Crouch

She didn’t have the photo in front of the Alamo. Suddenly, this angelic visitor arrives at is like, you’re actually gonna have a baby. You know.

00;03;20;04 – 00;03;20;18

Camille Hall-Ortega

Even though I’ve.

00;03;20;18 – 00;03;42;06

Andy Crouch

Never known the man. Right? And what does she do in Luke’s account of that? She runs, or she goes with haste to her cousin who lives far, you know, several days journey away and then visits her for weeks. It turns out her cousin is also expecting a baby very unexpectedly, right? Yeah. And, like, our instinct would have been make the personal connection.

00;03;42;09 – 00;04;13;24

Andy Crouch

Yeah. Until very recently. But under the influence of this idea, you know, we could get more out of the world if we depersonalized it. We have in a whole series of transactions, kind of redesigned our world to be less personal, more efficient, for sure, generating more economic, economic value in many ways. Yeah, but at the cost of no longer seeing ourselves, our relationships, and maybe even our relationship to the world as a whole, as a deeply personal affair.

00;04;13;25 – 00;04;18;04

Andy Crouch

So that’s good is kind of what the last book of mine is about. Indeed. Yeah.

00;04;18;09 – 00;04;42;06

Camille Hall-Ortega

That efficiency piece is really important because yes, there’s this tension there, right? That efficiency is good, right? Efficiency. We want that. Right. We’re making we’re making a little more money. We’re saving a little bit more time. Time is money. All of those things. There’s this instinct that, this is a positive. What’s the problem? What are we losing?

00;04;42;06 – 00;04;44;03

Camille Hall-Ortega

What are we losing out on? I think.

00;04;44;03 – 00;05;11;18

Andy Crouch

Yeah. So I would say that the two things that technology has allowed us to greatly expand for people are actually efficiency. You could say productivity, which is another way of saying efficiency. And I would add safety. So my concern is that we’ve taken that, that model, actually of both safety and productivity, interestingly, and applied it to realms of human experience where it doesn’t actually work very well.

00;05;11;18 – 00;05;33;05

Andy Crouch

And, and it is in everything that has to do with the formation of persons. So, where are the places where you and I are shaped to become the kind of people that we could be if someone cared enough to help us develop, help us be formed into something? Yeah, I think there are three big ones for most human beings.

00;05;33;06 – 00;06;06;26

Andy Crouch

The home is primary. There are things that happen in our family of origin. No matter how complex that is, that shape us in ways we can’t get anywhere else than school is another how human beings got shaped as young people in particular. And then for those who are, pursuing or can find themselves identified with a faith tradition, what you could broadly call church or religious community and it’s in those three places that I’m most worried, that when we start trying to be efficient, we’re actually missing the key thing because formation requires friction.

00;06;06;28 – 00;06;29;21

Andy Crouch

The whole point of efficiency is to make that clock work so predictably and reliably. It’s just that that’s not good for actually forming people. And, so in the formative places and I would say the formative stages of our lives and the big moments, I mean, like engagement, like the beginning of a marriage, where you may be of any age, but you’re starting out on some new thing together, a new relationship is being formed.

00;06;29;24 – 00;06;40;16

Andy Crouch

It’s in those places I think we should have way less technical, way less tolerance for efficiency. Yeah. And, and way less instinctive. Let’s make this productive.

00;06;40;16 – 00;06;59;17

Marcus Goodyear

Hearing you talk about the challenges of technology and the challenges of where efficiency and productivity fit, make me think about the way we approach challenges in general, whether it’s a technical challenge or an adaptive challenge. And I wonder if you could bring some of those ideas into this conversation.

00;06;59;19 – 00;07;19;28

Andy Crouch

Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, there’s different kinds of problems. And so I’m borrowing I would borrow this from a really wonderful thinker and writer and teacher named Ronald Heifetz, who back in the 1990s and then more recently, kind of extended this a bit. He said, there’s, there’s kind of three kinds of problems that we face as human beings.

00;07;20;01 – 00;07;38;11

Andy Crouch

And the first and most fun are what he calls purely technical problems. And this kind of problem. We can actually say what the problem is. That’s not true. Take it for the problem is clear and there’s a clear solution, and there’s probably an expert who knows what the solution is. Yeah. And you just have to do what they’re tells you to do.

00;07;38;12 – 00;07;56;06

Andy Crouch

So that’s what, hybrids and claras sometimes call type one problems. Purely technical. We know how to solve it. And the whole dream of the modern world is that we’ll be able to make all the problems technical, like, we’ll just solve all this stuff, and the experts will tell us how to do it. The problem is the problem is there’s two more types.

00;07;56;06 – 00;08;22;10

Andy Crouch

And so there’s an interesting, type what they call type two, which is is interesting because the problem is actually clearer and the solution may even be known and the expert knows what you need to do. But the problem is the so the subject of the patient. Let’s stick with the medical. Setting. The patient has to learn and grow and become something different to kind of implement the solution.

00;08;22;10 – 00;08;37;22

Andy Crouch

So this is what we call type two process. We actually know what the solution. It’s just that to actually implement you’d have to grow. Then there’s what Heifetz calls type three problems. And these are the really interesting ones. In fact, he actually says we probably shouldn’t call them problems because that implies there’s a simple solution out there.

00;08;37;25 – 00;08;59;08

Andy Crouch

So he calls them adaptive challenges or type three challenges. And this is where actually it’s not so clear even how we would name the problem. Like, so you know, what you did in your intro, Camille, is you try to sort of awaken us to a feeling we all have, that something has gone a little wrong and the world as we have it, that we’re lonelier than we thought we should be.

00;08;59;10 – 00;09;17;02

Andy Crouch

That we’re less connect. You know, people say often when you talk about social, we’re we’re more connected than ever. But we don’t feel more know. Right. That’s it. But but don’t you? I’m sure you felt even as you were thinking about how you’d start our conversation, like, how do I name this? Like what? What? How do I describe this process?

00;09;17;02 – 00;09;40;17

Andy Crouch

Not so clear. It’s not like I have an earache, you know, I’ve got a heartache. But where did it come from? What? And then the solution is not clear. And in this case, there may be people with a certain level of expertise, but even the expert has to learn and grow for to make progress on this. And there are things you can go to the doctor, such as certain conditions we don’t know how to cure.

00;09;40;20 – 00;10;07;03

Andy Crouch

I have a I have several friends who have lived for long seasons of their life with what we call chronic fatigue syndrome, and honestly, no one really knows what it is or where comes from. There is no pill and there’s no thing they can tell you to do that they know will work. And a physician for a physician to accompany a patient, who’s living with chronic fatigue, that physician who has trained their whole life to solve people’s problems has to realize, for now at least, I can’t solve this.

00;10;07;05 – 00;10;19;19

Andy Crouch

But I can be with you in it, and I can learn some things as we go, as your as your physician or clinician, there’s way more of life that is type three than we would like to admit. Yeah. So.

00;10;19;19 – 00;10;20;22

Camille Hall-Ortega

It’s a little messy.

00;10;20;24 – 00;10;38;23

Andy Crouch

There’s not exactly there’s no pill, there’s no answer. And so what does that require of us? It requires that we become a different kind of person than we are in order to be able to integrate whatever suffering is involved there, whatever, but also whatever opportunity for creativity is there.

00;10;38;23 – 00;10;45;08

Camille Hall-Ortega

We’re forgetting or not ever acquiring skill sets that are essential. Yes.

00;10;45;10 – 00;11;09;22

Andy Crouch

Yes. They’re not helping you grow as a human being. So I think truly human technology would be things that actually keep us engaged in the world, ideally with the four basic dimensions of being human, which are heart, soul, mind and strength. And I will say, I don’t know that there’s a better example than the bicycle. So maybe I pick this because I love it.

00;11;09;22 – 00;11;12;13

Andy Crouch

It’s it’s my favorite thing to do. Yeah.

00;11;12;16 – 00;11;13;27

Camille Hall-Ortega

Yeah. Because as a fan. Yeah.

00;11;14;00 – 00;11;37;27

Andy Crouch

All right. So, Marcus, you and I, at least. I mean, not everybody loves biking. And in fact, it’s a declining sport in the United States, which is interesting. But the thing about the bicycle is, it’s absolutely technology in the sense that it requires a lot of. There’s a lot of metallurgy involved. There’s, gears there’s all these things we’ve discovered through science that make biking compared to almost anything else human beings do, like it’s actually actually criminal.

00;11;37;27 – 00;11;39;12

Andy Crouch

It’s interesting. It’s very efficient.

00;11;39;15 – 00;11;40;26

Marcus Goodyear

It’s,

00;11;40;29 – 00;12;01;13

Andy Crouch

Steve Jobs famously said he wanted a computer to be a bicycle for the mind. And the reason he said that is that, human beings on their own are not faster than many, many other animals are lots of animals that cannot run or out fly or even out swim us. But a human being on a bicycle is the most efficient user of energy of any creature.

00;12;01;13 – 00;12;25;09

Andy Crouch

So the bicycle, you know, definitely it’s technology, but it involves you. It, it strengthens you. It trains you, you. I acquire certain kinds of skill. And when I’m out on my bike, this is for means a stationary bike in your basement. I’m, like, out in the world, and I’m experiencing sounds and smells and and feeling the rush of the wind.

00;12;25;09 – 00;12;50;00

Andy Crouch

And I’m fully engaged in the world. I think that’s a template. It’s why Steve Jobs chose it as his metaphor for the computer in the early days of Apple. The problem is, I don’t think we got a bicycle for the mind, I think I don’t think we got what Steve Jobs dreamed of. I think we got something like a self-driving car for the mind, which is you kind of open up the screen and it’s the algorithm starts doing stuff for you.

00;12;50;01 – 00;13;07;03

Andy Crouch

Yeah. And you may think, well, this is really cool. It’s like doing it itself, but it’s not. It’s not helping you be you. So real human technology would help you be you in a way that no device can replace. But that’s not mostly what we have. And it’s not mostly what we’ve chosen to fill our world with.

00;13;07;09 – 00;13;28;24

Marcus Goodyear

But also with a bike. I am the engine. You are the engine. Yeah. So we’re powering it in a different way than we might do where the computer is giving. Especially now with AI. The computer is giving thinking back to us. And so we at least have to bring the same level of thinking to it or, I don’t know, we’re talking about technology.

00;13;28;24 – 00;13;45;06

Marcus Goodyear

And it feels to me in some ways we’re we’re remiss if we don’t acknowledge that we are on the cusp of we don’t even know what. And I would just be curious to hear you talk about what new challenges and opportunities are you anticipating in the next 2 to 3 years? Talk about adaptive challenges faced coming our way.

00;13;45;09 – 00;14;06;27

Andy Crouch

We do. Well, indeed. Indeed. I mean, the dream continues. So I would say the dream we’ve been chasing with technology for about a hundred years because the scientific story is a few hundred years old, but we really start putting it all together into these things you might call devices, about 100 years ago at Broadway. And I think it’s an ancient dream of doing magic.

00;14;06;27 – 00;14;28;00

Andy Crouch

We want, like, the cheat code to the world. And magic is the dream that I’ll be able to kind of snap my fingers. And the world kind of springs to life at my command and ideally in submission to my will, and gets me all the good I want without my be having to become a different or more especially, a more loving kind of person.

00;14;28;00 – 00;14;51;22

Andy Crouch

Magic is the belief that all you need is power, and if you have enough power, you can get everything you want. And AI is the latest, wave of human beings trying to get something we can snap our fingers, have it spring to life, have it service. There’s a, poet. A poem by, the poet young Wolfgang von Gerta, written at the dawn of the scientific era, called, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

00;14;51;22 – 00;15;10;20

Andy Crouch

And almost all of us have. We know that we know of it through a Mickey mouse cartoon that was based on it. But but it’s an 18th century poem. About this, you know, poor apprentice, one day to be played by Mickey Mouse, who has to haul water and he, like, charms the broom. Right. And the broom starts carrying the water, and he’s like, this is great.

00;15;10;20 – 00;15;26;13

Andy Crouch

Like, now I can relax. Now the work will be done, of course, in the poem. And it’s so prophetic. And by Gertrude, by the way, Gertrude wrote this poem called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s kind of a sort of a singsong ballad. It’s very kind of charming in a way. And you can make a cute little Disney film out of it.

00;15;26;19 – 00;15;54;09

Andy Crouch

He also wrote a really long poem called Doctor Foust about a scientist, or cat scientist magician who wants the key to power and gets it by selling his soul to the devil and is ultimately taken down hell like it’s a parable of wanting to do magic and the cost to pay. So here we have these systems that because of some amazing emergent properties of mathematics, very simple mathematics.

00;15;54;09 – 00;16;16;02

Andy Crouch

Interestingly, I mean, not so simple that you and I can just sort of write it down, understand it all, but it’s not it’s actually not complicated. If you can give them everything human beings have ever put on the internet and they ingest at these what we call generative pre-trained transformer models. And, and they take it all in and then they do some math, very high dimensional but very simple math.

00;16;16;04 – 00;16;39;04

Andy Crouch

Something kind of emerges that is a lot like intelligence. I mean, artificial intelligence, it’s not it’s not created. It’s not natural. It it’s downstream of what human beings have done, but nonetheless, it kind of pops into being and it starts talking to you, you know, and you can tell it, hey, be a chat bot and you know, it should and can be extremely useful.

00;16;39;07 – 00;16;56;16

Andy Crouch

The problem is, it’s it’s also going to tempt us to take a forklift with us to the gym of life. Like, this is the best metaphor I’ve heard. I didn’t get it. But to bring a forklift to the gym, like, should you bring a forklift to the gym? Well, I mean, it depends on what you want.

00;16;56;16 – 00;17;14;12

Andy Crouch

Like, if you just want the weights to go up and down, the forklift will do more of that than you ever did. But if you’re going to the gym because you have this residual sense, I’m a human being. I’m not made to sit on a couch. I made to like, develop strength. The last thing you want is to let something else do it for you.

00;17;14;17 – 00;17;38;23

Andy Crouch

They will never be a person because a person is loved into being, and these entities have been willed into being, not loved. That we willed that they exist to serve our needs. And is that all bad? No, it but it does rule out they are not persons because a person exists in the world and thrives in the world because they’re loved.

00;17;38;23 – 00;17;46;05

Andy Crouch

And that’s just not how these systems work at all. No one’s ever tried to love them or, well, yeah, actually. Actually.

00;17;46;07 – 00;17;46;27

Camille Hall-Ortega

Yes.

00;17;46;29 – 00;17;47;16

Andy Crouch

That’s right. That’s a.

00;17;47;16 – 00;17;48;14

Camille Hall-Ortega

Little dark. Yes.

00;17;48;14 – 00;17;48;29

Andy Crouch

Yeah.

00;17;48;29 – 00;18;07;26

Camille Hall-Ortega

But I love how you brought that picture. Yes, I any I love how you paint that picture in this book. And I saw Mark as you kind of raising your eyebrows there, this idea of us existing and being people because we are loved and we have this desire to be loved and to love. Yeah, yeah. I would love Marcus.

00;18;07;28 – 00;18;09;25

Camille Hall-Ortega

Tell us your thoughts.

00;18;09;28 – 00;18;35;10

Marcus Goodyear

I mean, I want to back up and ask what I feel like is a really dumb question, but what exactly do we mean when we say love? Like, okay, so if I can’t love, what does that mean? And what does it mean when we love each other? Because I have read about these, I’ve read about these philosophers who work at anthropic, who are essentially coaching the AI.

00;18;35;10 – 00;18;52;00

Marcus Goodyear

They are treating it like a baby and helping it open its eyes, as they say. Now, these are metaphors, but that’s how they’re viewing the work. They’re doing. So right. How is that different? And how is the AI’s response to what they’re feeding at different than the way we treat our children? What does it mean to love another person?

00;18;52;02 – 00;19;30;12

Andy Crouch

Love is the realization that I, I come to care ultimately more about the good of this other that I encounter than I care about my own good. And I think there’s an element in it as well of freedom. That is AI. We could say voluntarily decide or choose maybe is a better word that that you there’s something about you that matters enough that I would give up things that matter to me, up to and including my own life.

00;19;30;12 – 00;19;49;09

Andy Crouch

And, I mean, I remember very vividly when I had a small child realizing, you know, until he was maybe one year old, he was just as our first child was starting to walk. And I, I remember, like, putting him to bed one night and suddenly having this scenario break into my mind of we lived on a very busy street.

00;19;49;09 – 00;20;09;17

Andy Crouch

There were busses that I by every 10 or 15 minutes and envisioning my little toddler son breaking free of my grasp for some reason, running out in front of a bus and realizing that if that were to happen and if my running in front of the bus and like knocking me out of the way and then me taking the hit of the bus would save his life, that I would do that without even reflecting.

00;20;09;21 – 00;20;26;16

Andy Crouch

Yeah, yeah, it would be. And you all feel this, I’m sure. Yeah. Then I had the interesting thought. If my wife Catherine, were to be stepping in front of a bus and my stepping, you know, would save her, and I thought I would do it, I would, but I would think about it like.

00;20;26;22 – 00;20;35;19

Marcus Goodyear

Oh, no, no, I have you had this talk with your wife. Maybe she shouldn’t listen to this episode. We’ll get that out. You know.

00;20;35;21 – 00;20;53;00

Andy Crouch

Just the moment I feel like, oh, me, Catherine, it has to be me, you know? But with my baby, I’m sorry. I just think there’s something about parenthood that that brings forth the, Like, no need to think. Yeah. Wired in your bones. I know it is terrible.

00;20;53;05 – 00;21;04;15

Marcus Goodyear

Yeah. I mean, you’re you’re talking. You’re talking a little bit about what it means to make individual choices that impact the people around us and benefit them, sometimes more than us. Which reminds me.

00;21;04;16 – 00;21;05;22

Andy Crouch

That sense of.

00;21;05;24 – 00;21;33;12

Marcus Goodyear

Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah. This reminds me of a, an audio clip from again deep in the archives of of Laity Lodges archives from September 2025 when, James Carr Smith, Jamie Smith was talking about materialism and simplicity and oh, wow, it comes at a lot of the ideas we’ve been talking about related to technology. So let’s take a moment to listen to this and then we’d love to get your take.

00;21;33;12 – 00;21;35;03

Marcus Goodyear

Andy. All right.

00;21;35;05 – 00;22;09;14

Speaker 4

Again, can we just be honest that in the context of American Christianity, where we inhabit unquestionably the most prosperous, affluent nation in the history of the world, the lures and temptations and malformations of materialism and consumerism is not just a matter of our individual personal habits and choices. It’s reflective of an entire social system that commodify everything and really ultimately exploits all of us.

00;22;09;21 – 00;22;47;03

Speaker 4

Though obviously in very, very different ways. I would say if we really want to have a more expansive sense of what’s at stake here, we need to stop thinking about this just in terms of possessions, and it’s almost more a matter of being possessed. I think as long as we only think about wealth and materialism as this kind of personal, private problem and how I relate to stuff, we won’t really understand why Jesus calls it mammon, a god, an idol, a false spirit that we have to wrestle with.

00;22;47;03 – 00;22;54;10

Speaker 4

We need to realize that this is a communal dynamic. It’s not just a private and personal dynamic.

00;22;54;13 – 00;22;59;03

Camille Hall-Ortega

And while we would love to hear your thoughts on this clip.

00;22;59;03 – 00;23;36;24

Andy Crouch

A very long and I would say with what Jamie is saying, there a couple things I would highlight. You know, we got around to this in an interesting way. I mean, this is the things we’re confronting are not individual problems. And I think part of what Jamie is saying is you can’t just or individually be like, I’m going to live a simpler life, you know, because we’ve made this collective decision as a whole society to pursue the kind of magic that we think is going to do amazing things and relieve us of so many burdens that we don’t want anymore.

00;23;36;26 – 00;24;01;18

Andy Crouch

And so it’s a inherently social, communal, as he says, problem. I actually the one thing that I think I would, go, go beyond what we heard at least just then, is I don’t think the problem is stuff. I think the problem is tools is, devices is things that work for us. It’s not just I want lots of things in my life.

00;24;01;18 – 00;24;27;11

Andy Crouch

It’s that I want robots. Yeah. You know, robot, some people know is a word coined by a, Czech writer. Who are you? Way. Yeah. Rossum’s universal robots, is the name of the, the the company in the play, and, Gosh, I’m not sure topic was his, the last name of this playwright.

00;24;27;13 – 00;24;53;19

Andy Crouch

And his brother was like, he was like, looking for a word to describe these kind of automatons that would, be made by human beings, but in the play ultimately rebelled against and, extinguished human beings. They actually extinguished the human race. And his bio is like, oh, you should use this word from the Slavic word robot, or, they pronounce it, but, that means slave, or, you know, enslaved, Thai population that work, without compensation.

00;24;53;23 – 00;25;13;08

Andy Crouch

I mean, yes, we we want lots of things, but what we really want is lots of, if I may be so bold slaves, that is, things that we are not morally accountable to that because they do not really love and we’re not loved into being. Don’t call forth love from us. They are just useful to us. But wouldn’t it be handy if they actually acted like people?

00;25;13;12 – 00;25;29;18

Andy Crouch

Because then we could talk to them and then we could, you know, get them to do all the things we want people to do for us. But you can’t properly ask people to do, like be available any time of day to do anything we want. Yeah. You know, like like we have no obligations to them morally. And why do we want them?

00;25;29;19 – 00;26;01;16

Andy Crouch

This is Jamie who says this, and I think this is very important. There is a power at work in the world that Jesus gives us the proper name for that is not just its generic description, but it’s like the the name, like your parent would give you a name. Yeah, its name is Mammon. Yeah. And mammon is the principle of using the material things of the world to get power such that you can get whatever you want, without responsibility, duty, obligation or, certainly not love.

00;26;01;18 – 00;26;28;19

Andy Crouch

And I really believe, you know, if you ask, why are technologies deployed? They are not deployed. They aren’t even deployed consistently because they’ll make our lives better. Because if that were the case, when meta as it’s called now, or Facebook as it was for many years, got the first bit of research, internal research well validated that that its own products were doing harm to the self-image of teenage girls.

00;26;28;21 – 00;26;44;10

Andy Crouch

The whole system would have been like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we’ve got change this. Clearly something’s wrong. And there were people in metal who wanted to do that, but the system as a whole was like, we’re going to disregard that. We’re going to suppress that. We’re going to stop doing that research. Why? Because it’s more profitable to do what we’re doing.

00;26;44;17 – 00;27;04;26

Andy Crouch

Yeah, we don’t have these technologies in our pockets because they’re good for us. We have them in our pockets because they are good for mammon, for the principle of gaining wealth and power. Through the material things of the world and by disregarding the obligations of love. So I think, I mean, those are my riffs on what I hear there.

00;27;04;26 – 00;27;22;10

Andy Crouch

And, and it also makes you realize, like, the stakes here are, you know, I wrote a book called The Tech Wise Family. That’s been why the read. I’m so glad. I’m really glad for all the influence it’s had. But the only thing I don’t like about it is when people say, oh, Andy wrote a really good book about screen time limits for kids.

00;27;22;12 – 00;27;38;13

Andy Crouch

I’m like, that is not what I was trying to write about. Like, the game is so much bigger. First of all, it’s not just about the kids. The kids want their parents dead screen time out of your ass because they’re like, I wish my parents would put down their phone and talk to me. Yeah, but it’s it’s not even about the screens.

00;27;38;13 – 00;28;02;14

Andy Crouch

It’s about what are we after in this world? And who’s whispering on our ear? Because I, I define the demonic that is the the spiritual powers that rebel against God as a will with a whisper. The demonic is not able to directly take over the created world because they don’t have bodies. But what they can do is whisper in our ears and say, wouldn’t you like to have power?

00;28;02;17 – 00;28;10;29

Andy Crouch

Wouldn’t you like life to be easy? Wouldn’t you like to not have to love in order to get what you want? And, the communal question,

00;28;11;01 – 00;28;12;24

Camille Hall-Ortega

Wouldn’t you like all the knowledge?

00;28;12;27 – 00;28;39;25

Andy Crouch

What? Yes, exactly. And of course, there’s a whisper that, one story says our parents heard and took the bait, which was. Wouldn’t you like to be like God? No. Good or evil. Would you like the tree of the knowledge? Yeah. And, Yeah. And we’ve got to decide. No, we actually don’t want. I don’t want any. Good thing, without becoming, a different kind of person who is able to handle it.

00;28;39;25 – 00;29;00;03

Andy Crouch

And that will mean ultimately becoming fully transformed by love to handle all the good this world could, could offer me. I have to become entirely formed by love. And that will not. There’s no shortcuts. And we have to become the kind of people who say. I’m not interested in the shortcut. I don’t want your left.

00;29;00;05 – 00;29;01;07

Camille Hall-Ortega

Yeah.

00;29;01;09 – 00;29;01;28

Andy Crouch

Yeah.

00;29;02;01 – 00;29;29;11

Camille Hall-Ortega

I think it’s so important Jamie gets at something here. Of course. There’s so much there. But this idea of this being a communal dynamic and I think about, you know, in sort of these practical terms, when I apply this same logic to the use of technology, I think about the fact that there are we have all adopted these technologies in ways that would make it difficult for me just to say, oh, yeah, I’m gonna stay off my phone.

00;29;29;12 – 00;29;50;05

Camille Hall-Ortega

I’m gonna stay off my phone. My mom would have a problem with me staying off my phone for a full day. Right? Like I said, Kathy, I was going to be like, you didn’t call me back, right? That there there is this necessarily inherently communal dynamic at play here. Yeah. We’re yeah. We don’t make that decision in a vacuum.

00;29;50;06 – 00;30;12;04

Marcus Goodyear

No. Yeah. This is a social compact wherein, my wife and I fantasize about getting a flip phone, and we’re like, wait a minute. We lose our authenticator apps. I would lose podcasts. I mean, you know, I do love podcasts. I would I wouldn’t be able to text people. That’s kind of the least of my problems. But I’ve experienced this over the last three years as I’ve been biking to work because I got rid of my car.

00;30;12;06 – 00;30;19;00

Marcus Goodyear

My family has a car, but I bike to work all the time. And let me tell you, it is, It’s stressful.

00;30;19;02 – 00;30;40;21

Andy Crouch

Well, I think you guys are so right. I mean, John Hiatt and others have. Have. Yeah. Raised the salience of this phrase, collective action problems, you know, because that is what smart phones are with kids, which is what John is working on in particular. And so, yeah, I think there’s, you know, I would say it’s both like, I think there’s bad news and good news.

00;30;40;21 – 00;31;05;18

Andy Crouch

So the bad news is indeed we’re all kind of implicated in this. And it’s very hard to extricate yourself, especially when mom’s sending the text message. The good news, though, I think, is, we can redesign. I really think we can redesign. And it’s not about the things. It’s about the processes and the assumptions and the dreams we’re chasing with these things.

00;31;05;20 – 00;31;31;19

Andy Crouch

Yes. In in the life we’re looking for the most, the most recent book, I talk about the difference between devices, which I would use for all the technology that kind of, lets us off the hook, you might say, of being human and does things for us. But there’s another kind of very high tech stuff which I call instruments, which are can be very technologically advanced, but keep human beings fully engaged with each other in the world.

00;31;31;21 – 00;31;57;00

Andy Crouch

And we can absolutely start kind of insisting, as you could say, as consumers or as users or purchasers. I’m, I only want this if I can use it to be human. And we need like a worldwide now to do it quickly because it’s only getting harder, like redesign of what we’re expecting these things. And I don’t think that’s out of reach.

00;31;57;05 – 00;32;16;27

Andy Crouch

But it does require a kind of new imagination and the will to say, hey, mom, let’s figure out how we can stay in touch. But I need to not be kind of at the mercy of my device. So how would we do it? And you figure that out with your family, with your coworkers, you know, and but we have to have the, like, desire to live human lives again.

00;32;16;27 – 00;32;19;08

Andy Crouch

And that’s sort of what why I write what I write.

00;32;19;14 – 00;32;44;25

Camille Hall-Ortega

Yes. Well, thank you for doing that. Yeah. And as we’re, as we’re nearing a close here, I, we have referenced it and made nods to it throughout. But I would love to know if you have any more to say about whether there is a unique, issue or, need for people of faith to really tackle this issue of overuse of technology.

00;32;44;28 – 00;32;51;10

Camille Hall-Ortega

Is is there is there something is there nuance here specifically for people of faith and technology?

00;32;51;12 – 00;33;09;13

Andy Crouch

I think actually one of the cool things, if you could say that about some of the discontent of with technology is how broadly shared it is. There are other issues on which I, as a person of faith, am really concerned about. My neighbor who may not share my faith, actually isn’t concerned at all about it. Or maybe on the other side on this issue, we’re kind of on the same side.

00;33;09;17 – 00;33;43;12

Andy Crouch

Like, we all feel like something’s wrong. We all feel like something needs to be redesigned. And I think that’s a beautiful moment of solidarity and opportunity for a kind of dialog about what is being human and what really matters that we haven’t maybe had a reason to have for many years. So I would just say that. But I do believe for those of us who, and faith can be a lot of things, but, you know, let’s say you orient your life around the story told through the Jewish and Christian scriptures of a God loving God who, comes actually in the flesh and joins our human condition and then sends his spirit

00;33;43;12 – 00;34;24;05

Andy Crouch

such that we can actually share in his divine life this kind of Trinity story, of the Christian faith. There’s two things that that, are, are real resources for kind of addressing the moment we’re and the first is we have a coherent story of what it is to be human. And by the way, it’s centers on a human being who call themselves using this Hebrew expression, the Son of man, which means kind of the, the, the it’s, son of in Hebrew means kind of, typifying or like the, the example of, you know, and, and so he’s like saying I if you look at my life, I, I want you

00;34;24;05 – 00;34;43;11

Andy Crouch

to come to believe that I’m actually showing you the best way to be human. And the fascinating thing is he did not use any technology, including the ones available in the first two technologies in human history, in some ways are money and writing. And Jesus of Nazareth. There was apparently a purse of money, but it was carried by the disciples.

00;34;43;11 – 00;35;08;08

Andy Crouch

He never it was actually carried by the least reliable disciple of Jesus. Yes. So he didn’t he didn’t care about money. He didn’t rely on money. You didn’t need money to get done what he got done in the world, his incredibly consequential life. And he didn’t write anything down. Other people did, but he himself did not. So the most consequential human life, is not one that depends on even the things we consider indispensable.

00;35;08;08 – 00;35;29;25

Andy Crouch

They weren’t for him. So. So we’ve got a story. And also, you know, Marcus story has that impossible question. What is love? Well, you know, and ultimately, to answer that, you gotta go find a story that will help you understand it. That’s right. The Christian belief, the Christian claim and offer to the world is this story will tell you if you want to know what love is.

00;35;29;28 – 00;35;48;03

Andy Crouch

Yeah. It’s everything you thought it more. It’s everything you thought in different. And it’s told in this story that starts in Genesis and ends in revelation. Yeah. So we’ve got the story and we’ve got the example and, and not just, like, a theoretical example, but someone who took it all on, all the pain of being human, all the risk.

00;35;48;05 – 00;36;08;08

Andy Crouch

We’re recording this in the season of lent, where we pray that, in some traditions, this is the one who was tempted in every way like we were, but without falling prey to temptation, like he he he’s in it with us. Right. So that’s amazing. Yeah. And then the other thing I would say is that, human nature abhors a cultural vacuum.

00;36;08;08 – 00;36;16;14

Andy Crouch

So if you say don’t do something like stop, stop checking your social media every five minutes or whatever, you got to give people something else to do.

00;36;16;16 – 00;36;19;01

Marcus Goodyear

Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

00;36;19;03 – 00;36;41;18

Andy Crouch

And nothing gives you a more robust way and a community who will do it with you of a different thing to do with your life, a different rhythm, to order your life by a different way of spending your hours, your days, your weeks, then then the practice of faith. And and this is why people like John Hiatt, who I’ve collaborated with on some things, a John, well, very straightforwardly say he doesn’t believe in God.

00;36;41;18 – 00;37;05;01

Andy Crouch

He’s a very secular person. The, ethnically, Jewish, but John will be the first to say only religious communities are having any different outcomes from anyone. They’re only the only ones having beneficial outcomes, in technology, especially with children, which is what he is working the hardest. Yeah. Because religious communities actually can hold together a different way of being human and do it in the face of pressure.

00;37;05;01 – 00;37;23;01

Andy Crouch

And when the whole world is doing something different. So, ultimately, not just because we’re really good people and we band together, but because we inhabit a story that gives us a reason to be a different kind of people, and then gives us a group of people to do it with. So those things are the indispensable contributions that faith makes.

00;37;23;01 – 00;37;47;12

Andy Crouch

And, and, the just beautiful thing is that our whole world is hungry for it. Yeah. And for those of us who believe we’re called to share our faith, there’s no more amazing time than right now to say I believe something different. And my community and I are living it out and. And come and come and see, like, yeah, we’d love to have you join us because we think it’s the way back to real human life.

00;37;47;13 – 00;37;55;27

Camille Hall-Ortega

Gosh, Andy, that, just feels like, a perfect place to really wrap up. And anything else we should be on the lookout for coming up for you.

00;37;56;00 – 00;37;56;09

Marcus Goodyear

Oh.

00;37;56;16 – 00;38;20;26

Andy Crouch

I’ll just keep a look. Look out for our community at Praxis, which is by job creators, entrepreneurs and venture builders and, given the topic of this conversation, I just say we’ve got a couple of we call them opportunities for redemptive imagination, where we have whole groups of entrepreneurs working on issues. And one is technology and family life and another is, artificial intelligence.

00;38;20;26 – 00;38;43;02

Andy Crouch

And we have a redemptive thesis for artificial intelligence. How people actually build all this stuff could think differently about it. And you can find that online if you Google like Praxis redemptive thesis for artificial intelligence. So read how our community is actually building companies, with a different kind of vision of what it is we have. And so, yeah, maybe not so much my own work, but those are the people I collaborate with every day.

00;38;43;04 – 00;38;51;04

Camille Hall-Ortega

I love it, Andy, we’re so grateful for your time and for our conversation. This has been awesome. So thank you very much.

00;38;51;06 – 00;38;52;10

Andy Crouch

Such a gift. Thank you.

00;38;52;10 – 00;38;54;05

Marcus Goodyear

Thank you Andy. Thank you so much.